


Years (Oikawa Tooru)

by lunasparker



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, F/M, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Teen Angst, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:48:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29581197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunasparker/pseuds/lunasparker
Summary: Your high school life was better and worse with him in it. [Short Story]
Relationships: Oikawa Tooru/Reader
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	1. The First Year

The first year of high school was always the most important. It was the make or break for everyone, for those stuck in cliches and groups they yearned to distance themselves from, for those who aimed high for valedictorian and went beyond the syllabus, and for you, the girl who had trailed her friends and boyfriend from Kitagawa (God, that seems so far away now, doesn't it?) to Aoba Johsai. You followed them like a another dot in the crowd, lost in the ever merging and convoluted spaces of people. Yet somehow, when you were with him, you stood out a little bit more, and you didn't know what to make of it.

Your parents weren't fond that you had set yourself such low expectations in life; go to school, go to university, get a job, get married, have kids. One thing after another, what you perceived to be a checklist mandated for every being was what your parents thought to be obstacles in your never-ending marathon that was life. They didn't like how you followed your friends to high school, although they had to admit Aoba Johsai was a great high school in terms of academia.

The first year of high school was a little more rough on you than others. Maybe it was because the pressure had gotten to you within weeks and suddenly everything had piled up onto each other, everything was suddenly so important and cramming in braindead information was the number one priority. He saw this, like many others. He saw how nervous you were at parties, how your mind constantly drifted to the next piece of homework and that essay you never got around to doing. He didn't like that worry that had settled into those precious eyes of yours, the fiddling of your fingers and your growing absence at parties. By this point, he was your friend. You only knew him because you shared classes with him, but who would have thought that all it took for the popular playboy and the mundane girl sitting at the back of the class to be friends was a simple class?

But anyhow, by summer things had started to move in nicely. You were starting to get a feel for what being sixteen meant, and the midterms had been left behind like the fallen sakura blossoms of lost spring. The skies were cerulean and sweet azure, endless as clouds flecked about and birds soared. Your friends were excited for the long summer that was arriving sooner than expected. While they saw movies and sleepovers and parties, you saw the opportunity for a break indoors. To watch that episode of that show you missed a few weeks ago. To revisit the classics of your childhood.

He loved how different you were to your gaggle of friends. You weren't just another face in the crowd to him, and that surprised you. After all, no one had seen you any different for sixteen years, so why should he? Well maybe it was because you knew him enough to be friends but not enough to be anything more. As though you cautiously kept him at arms length, watched him from afar with somber. He was definitely someone you liked, but you couldn't afford to contract that contagious laugh and that infectious rambling feeling you often got in his presence, you know, the one that makes you do whatever he wants?

Which was why, during the first year, it was studies over parties for you. Your friends found this surprising, especially given how notorious you were never accomplishing homework, but sixteen ended up being more messy than you wanted it to be. I mean, when summer rolled by, your best friend had gotten themselves a boyfriend, your other friend went abroad for six weeks, and _he_ spent all his time playing volleyball. Everything felt awfully distant in your life, even your parents who worked so much that you barely saw them felt absent in this life of yours. But you often felt your life didn't matter in the great scheme of things.

Of course, he didn't think so.

Which was why, during the summer, he invited you to another one of his parties and it was there that maybe your first year of high school turned into something different. Parties were something you knew, you know, the ones at bowling alleys and the cinema. But the transition to high-school had it's costs and one of them was the total demolition of what 'parties' meant in the past.

Because the moment you stepped into his home, dressed in something plain and easily overlooked, the atmosphere surrounded you was one you were not familiar with. These parties had the soft drinks and the light snacks like many others did but they also had those sickening flashing lights that changed colour and the music that blared loudly as people danced carelessly to it.

You didn't realise that five minutes later you would find yourself kissing him, or that you now had a boyfriend.

High school had flipped your life upside down and gave you a new experience: love.

The rest of your first year never felt so good.


	2. The Second Year

The second year of high school was maybe where things started to go wrong. Love was not the delicious delicacy you had thought it to be, fantasising the movies that influenced your life to make it out to be. Love, in all it's glory, was not sweet carmine wine that you drank on occasion like an addicting little drink. It was more or less a blood-red poison that was going to change you.

Love makes you do crazy things. And your second year showed you that.

By this point, many things had happened. Second year was different now. More weight, more emphasis on your work, more school and more friends and more things to add to your plate of worry. You had a boyfriend. That word sounded so strange. It never rolled off your tongue as easily as it did for him. You see, previously to you, that word encapsulated the dreamy athletic teenagers that appeared in those sappy romance films, the ones who smiled so brightly it was comical and flattering, the ones who held those preserved pretty pink roses in their hand and handed it with a heartfelt note to their lover. Was he ever like that? Yeah, having him as someone you loved was addicting for you. But it was just all so new.

Peer pressure meant that you had now completely broken away from your routine of last year, the whole 'studying' agenda had been thrown out a window. And replaced in it's wake were his parties that never ended and summer days filled with laughs and drinks. You had fallen for him without a doubt, but you fell into the endless pit of love, the abyssal concept of lust had suffocated you, manipulating you into thinking it was enlightenment. Those hazel eyes, the ones you swooned over often simply because of how soft and brown they were, like the rich soil of summer and the crackly leaves of autumn. The swept-back hair, often messy (especially when you ran your fingers through it playfully — he always let you do that), was also brown, like sweet chocolate, smooth and thick. And then there was that infectious smile. The one that never failed to entrance you, to make your own lips curve upwards. The smile that accompanied his childish words, the smile that present everywhere you were.

He was still neck-deep into his facade, the one that without a doubt he always pulled. You know, the one where he pretends everything is fine when everything is _not fine_ — your life is falling apart, your grades are dropping, your parents wish for a better daughter, your friends hate you, _everything is not fine._ And so, along with that facade, the same one that you fell for even though you knew it wasn't real, came with the parties and loud music and drunk games of volleyball in the backyard with a makeshift net.

These parties were becoming more and more of a thing for you. The music, songs you knew all the words to, was an escape from your life at home, where your parents want you to be better, to be yourself and to not give everything up for a boy, for _him_. But you would give him everything if he asked for it. You thought he deserved it.

Until he very clearly didn't.

Your mind wasn't in the best place that fateful night, under the shining luminous moon and the accompanying white stars of the black sky. He had been distant as of late but you ignored it. The pressure of volleyball had mounted on top of exams and so you thought nothing of it. You couldn't handle your liquor, obviously. You were still seventeen, even when most of your friends with their early birthdays and relaxed parents were eighteen, but that didn't stop you from dabbling a little, _just_ a little. Who wouldn't want to do it anyway? Everyone had watched you eagerly, their eyes staring like hawks at you and that red solo cup filled with a little alcohol. They had pressured you into conforming to their standard, and it worked like a charm, especially for someone like you who just wanted to be the same as everyone else. Who didn't want to miss out.

You didn't know why you went upstairs, maybe just to be alone for a bit, being a little bit drunk made you sad. It made you wear your heart on the outside, unbeknownst to you. But it was well-known that the charm of liquor was that it revealed your inner emotions, our inner turmoils, it turned you inside out and revealed your vulnerable weak form to the world to pick apart like vultures. You stumbled up the stairs, throwing the empty cup to the side. Your head pounded, as though someone had hit your forehead with a sledgehammer. It was painful to hear the inner drumming rap against your skull.

You pushed open a door, any door. An escape.

But instead of an escape, it shoved into the face of reality.

Your vision was blurry and your mind sick so it didn't quite click together at first. The shock wasn't absorbed, nor did it truly sink in, but still, that didn't stop it from occurring. He was still kissing her, whoever she was.

Well, whoever she was. She definitely wasn't you.

You blinked, startled momentarily, your eyes pressing shut for a few seconds to succumb to another weary headache. Then your fingers reached your lips, the same ones he kissed often, behind the school with your back pressed against the same wall his hand was on, and sometimes under the cherry blossom trees in the park next to Sendai Gymnasium. You could still feel the butterflies in your stomach, the same ones you often felt with giddiness at the shared intimacy between you two.

And then you turned, stumbling back to your friends and even though that image haunted your dreams, you chose to forget it ever existed. Because you didn't want it to be real and it couldn't be real if you said it wasn't, right? After all, in that moment, in his bedroom above the loud ongoing party, it was just you, him and _her_ , whoever she was.

The rest of the year passed by excruciatingly slowly. And your life was slowly crumbling apart.


	3. The Third Year

The third year of high school trickled by like a slow but steady stream.

Like Atlas, you held up the world now, felt it's burdening expectations and the pressure to be this person you had made yourself out to be. You had somehow, turned into him. You had two faces now and you didn't know what to make of it.

Rumours spread like wildfire and it wasn't long before everyone knew that he was cheating on you. Even you knew, but you had turned a blind eye, because you didn't want to believe. That was justified, of course. Your whole life people had hurt you, left you embedded with scars when they pressed pretty roses with deadly thorns into your innocent palms.

And when you thought you found someone you could finally be yourself around, it all fell apart.

You didn't think anything of it when he excused himself from the little dates you liked to have at that small cafe opposite your house, or that weekly movie night at his, where you snuggled towards under a bundle of baby blue blankets. You didn't care anymore when he arrived late to lessons with his collar a little unkempt and his cheeks flustered.

You still went to his volleyball games. You still cheered him on during those fateful matches at Sendai Gymnasium, in one hand being the iconic aquamarine banner of Seijoh and in the other your phone which you recorded his matches because you knew he liked to view them afterwards. You always did the little things for him, like drawing a smiley face on the corners of the pages in his notebook, and leaving a fresh towel for him after games, and waiting after school to walk him home when volleyball practice was finished. You thought this is what love is. This is the affection you gave to him and surely he would give it back.

Love was a poison that blinded you from the truth.

Except, by the end of the third year, your friends had finally had enough and ripped off the blindfold you had seemingly been wearing all along. The blindfold that made you blindly trust him.

"He's cheating on you," They had said, their eyes wavering with concern, their voices tired from having to repeat it so often.

You brushed it off with ease, because he still loved you, right? And that was what mattered. Besides... it couldn't real, because you didn't want it to be.

Your nonchalance scared them but your friends persisted because that's what friends are for, right?

And even though they had revealed the truth behind the façade, you still went about your life, because you didn't want it to fall apart. You wanted that life where he would kiss you behind the school and where your parents were happy with your life and your grades weren't falling. You wanted your life to be the way it always was meant to be.

But fate wouldn't have it and your third year of high school was where the mirror that reflected that picture perfect life, cracked and in shambles, was finally broken. And the shards of glass spilt everywhere, jagged edged cutting your skin to leave you in pain.

Because you were in pain.

But you hid it well. So well, that even he didn't realise the trouble he had caused. So well, that people couldn't figure out why you hadn't come to school that day, and the next day, and the day after, until the principal came into the homeroom and told them all the truth.

Meanwhile, you watched from above. Because what else you could do? Were you free?

You were lost.

And the years were not kind to you after all.

[You were lost, mindless as you followed the crowd. And when he pulled you away, thinking he had freed you for himself, he ended up being the person who hurt you the most.]


End file.
